MMT has the mechanics of money correct as well as the belief that austerity is stupid, but their idea of a Job Guarantee is squarely within the current monetary and financial paradigm of Debt Only. Of course there’s nothing about a job guarantee that couldn’t be incorporated into the new paradigm…undoubtedly in a much smaller way for anyone who was having trouble finding purpose without putting in their 40 hrs/week, but the idea and policy is still captured by the current paradigm.

Steve Keen is an insightful macro-economist, even though he’s still unconscious of the fact that with his “when the rate of change in credit falls the economy enters recession” he has merely re-discovered C. H. Douglas’s empirical cost accounting insight about the fundamental scarcity flow of total individual incomes in ratio to total costs/prices, by coming to it from the opposite abstract direction.

The fact is, macro-economics is a very recent tool which lacks both historical insight regarding the operant factor of private indebtedness in the collapse of civilizations and also was born into the fully obscured nature of the current paradigm and so simply considered private money creation to be a legitimate business model instead of it obviously being a titanically costly parasite as Michael Hudson has accurately assessed. It’s also post retail sale which is currently the only legitimate end of the economic/productive process because it is where production becomes consumption, and if possession is 90% of the law possession as in consumption is 99.99% of economics.

Economists have become so caught up in their abstractions that they have failed to recognize the paradigm changing policy insights to be derived from the digital nature of the empirical tool and invention of double entry bookkeeping. They have also not recognized the terminal expression point for any and all types of inflation, and simultaneously with that, the fact that terminal ending point of the entire economic process as per above that enables the discount/rebate policy to cut through all of the complexity that confuses and obscures and makes the simple, but not simplistic, accomplishment of the new paradigm.

No, it took a non-economist with an open mind to educate himself in heterodoxy and who had the right set of intellectual curiosities to take a superior 100 year old theory and raise its policies to the level of a very long over due paradigm change, so long term and over due that it will have multi-systemic “knock on” effects not seen since the kind of change that took place from Hunting and Gathering to Agriculture-Homesteading.

Too bad. Too sad. But paradigm changes while being terrifically beneficial….are just as unforgiving of those unable or unwilling to see them.